


Abracadabra (Magic Tricks)

by Tricochet



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magic AU, Now You See Me AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 08:59:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18847804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricochet/pseuds/Tricochet
Summary: John Constantine is a small-time street magician. When he starts getting mysterious instructions on how to commit robberies during performances, he doesn’t mind. He also has a fondness for one of the agents assigned to track him down.





	Abracadabra (Magic Tricks)

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is an adaptation of Now You See Me, which is one of my favorite movies. Basically all you need to know about the plot is that four magicians are given instructions on how to pull off magic heists. It is a great movie, but it does involve some… questionable language.

Ava stares across the table at her witness. He mostly looks confused. “Look, how did you rob the bank?”

“I didn’t mean to! I thought it was all part of the show. Until the money started appearing, I thought it was an act.”

“That’s bullshit,” Ava says. The witness stares for a second, before jumping onto the chair and moving his arms in an instrumental motion. 

“What the fuck?” Ava asks Gary. Until then, he’s been waiting. He’d already questioned this particular witness and gotten nothing useful.

“Oh. There was a hypnosis event during the show. ‘Bullshit’ is one of the words that makes this guy think he’s in the Symphonic.”

“Of course,” Ava says. “Well, we still have the magician.”

Gary had been under orders to wait for Ava before talking to the suspect, so he gladly shows Ava into the room. 

The magician is handcuffed, but his feet are still propped on the desk. He’s wearing the same red tie and trenchcoat he had in every picture Gary had found of him online. His hair is messy, and he has a smirk to the side. He’d gotten someone to bring him a bottle of soda, and he takes a swig before even looking at the agents. He makes eye contact with Gary. 

“Ah, the Bureau. Here to let me out? Let me guess. Your name - starts with a J too. No, a G. Gerald? Ah, Gary.” Unbelievably British. 

“That’s not mentalism. I know how you got that. It says so on my badge,” Gary tells the guy. He shrugs. 

“Alright, then. I’m getting something else, though.” The suspect puts a cuffed hand up to his forehead. “I’m getting a tad of a jokester impression. You have a sense of humor. Oh, and you’re single. I might file that away for later use. You have resentment, but you just want to do good. You feel unappreciated. You’ve worked here for a few years now, but-”

Ava shushes him. He looks her up and down. “Ah, tightly wound. You’re the boss here. You try not to be a control freak, but it doesn’t work. You hate being behind a desk, ever, but you want to give all the orders.” 

“If I wanted a therapist, I’d pay for one. Is your name John Constantine?”

“Master of the Dark Arts, right here. Let me try something.”

He reaches into his front pocket for a deck of cards. He fans them out with his eyes closed, telling Gary to pick any of them. It’s awkward with his hands so close together, but Gary grabs the eight of hearts. 

“And there’s a pen in my shirt pocket, love.”

Gary frowns but plays along. 

“Write your name on the card and put it back in my hand.”

Gary sighs. Constantine opens his eyes and shuffles the cards without breaking eye contact with Gary. When he fans them out again, Gary’s card is missing. Ava knocks the cards from his hand and continues her line of questioning.

“You’re a magician?”

“Yes. Can you believe your people wouldn’t even bring a real beer for me? Took my lighter too.”

“Were you involved in the robbery of a bank last night?”

“Hm. Was I?”

Ava slams her hands on the table in front of John. He gestures quickly with his hands. Gary looks down, and the handcuffs are around Ava’s wrists now. She swears. Gary laughs. She glares more. 

“Sorry, love. I’d actually rather see you in handcuffs, but the trick works better with someone standing right in front of me,” John says to Gary. He moves for the door, but Gary blocks him with an arm. 

“You’re still under questioning,” Gary says. 

“Unless you’re going to charge me or buy me dinner, I’m going to dash now. And I don’t think you can charge me. You can’t get a DA to go after me for magic, so I’m safe. Don’t worry, though. We’ll meet again. Look in the soda bottle.”

Gary watches him walk away. Ava is swearing behind him, trying to open the handcuff lock. She squirms. 

“Green!” she yells at him. Gary moves and picks up the bottle of soda Constantine had been drinking. The key is somehow inside. So is Gary’s card. Gary flips it and tries to pour it out, but John had somehow frozen it. 

“Well, looks like we’ll have to wait for it to thaw,” Gary says cheerfully. Ava curses. “I do think I know how he did the bank trick, though. He supposedly used a device to transport an audience member to the bank and showed it on a screen, and there was apparently a flash of light, right? I bet, when we look, there’ll be a trapdoor under the stage. The light would have given Constantine a chance to drop the witness through.”

“That doesn’t explain how the bank actually got robbed.”

“No, I don’t know that part yet. But the witness who supposedly went into the bank never made it there. We still don’t have enough to charge him, but I think he’s going to pull something like this again.”

“We can get him. Next time.”

Gary starts to pick up the cards Ava had scattered. 

“I don’t even know how the card fit in. Even if he rolled it up…”

“We’ll get him,” Ava says.   
The next performance has Gary and Ava sitting a few rows from the front in their suits. Gary had insisted on wearing sunglasses. John Constantine struts onto the stage and sees them within a second. 

“I want to give a special shoutout to Agents Ava Sharpe and Gary Green for being my most loyal fans.” Constantine blows a kiss in their direction. Gary had forgotten how British he sounds. 

The screen above Constantine’s head pans to Gary and Ava. Ava frowns. Gary waves and smiles. Ava grabs his hand and pins it to the armrest, muttering at him to look serious. 

“For the first segment of the show, I will be hypnotizing a few audience volunteers. This will not pay off immediately, but it will be worth it. Now, think of a number between one and three hundred. Who was thinking of fifty-two? Front row, blue shirt. And you, blonde hair, back row.” 

John lists characteristics until there’s a dozen people standing behind him, supposedly all who had thought of the number fifty-two. He flips a coin in his hand. 

“Now, sleep. Follow the coin. At some point later tonight, you will all become football players. Your football, not my football. And you will pile onto a quarterback. How will you know when and who? The quarterback will be someone who yells to freeze. Then, your duty will be to jump onto the quarterback.”

He sends them back with a snide remark about the violence of American football. His next act involves some sort of bubble. He floats above the crowd. Gary squints, looking for the wires. The bubble pops when Constantine is right above Gary’s head, and the magician somehow falls. Gary gasps. Constantine stops falling a millimeter above Gary’s lap, throwing an arm around Gary’s shoulder and kissing him on the cheek. The bubble somehow expands again, lifting Constantine back up. Gary touches the side of his face, making a show of wiping it. 

Constantine climbs a ladder, strips off his trenchcoat, and sits on the edge of a water tank. An iron ball is next to him on the platform. The magician makes a show of fastening the ball to his arms with a chain. He dangles his feet in the water. 

“Once the ball leaves the platform, a timer will start. After one minute, a swarm of piranhas will be released into the water.”

Constantine drops through the water and starts to fidget with the chain. Gary yawns. Constantine must have a way out. Magicians are good at avoiding any real danger, although Gary wouldn’t mind Constantine’s white shirt becoming see-through. Gary fidgets with the eight of hearts in his hand. However, as the timer ticks and John continues thrashing near the bottom of the tank, Gary starts to wonder. 

Ava checks her phone and suddenly tenses beside Gary. 

“Green. I just got word of another robbery. Just down the road, some millionaire’s personal jewelry stash and a bunch of cash from a safe just went missing. What’s the bet Constantine’s behind it?”

The timer hits zero, but Constantine is still in the tank. Gary grimaces as he sees a rush of red. It swirls, and the audience gasps. Gary stares as the red starts to slow and clear. 

It isn’t blood. It’s petals. Gary looks behind him just in time to see Constantine drop from the ceiling, dripping wet and wearing what looks like several diamond necklaces. The audience starts to cheer again. The rose petals aren’t the only thing in the water. Gary sees flickers of green. Cash. The audience starts to notice too. 

Ava stands up, pointing her gun at Constantine. 

“Ava, no!” Gary yells, before Ava shouts at Constantine to freeze.

“Quarterback!” one of the hypnotized people shouts, and they start to run at Gary and Ava. The closest one slams into Gary and jumps on Ava. Ava makes eye contact and mouths for Gary to go after Constantine. Gary dodges the next hypnotee and runs, jumping onto the stage and pursuing Constantine. Constantine runs behind the stage, and Gary follows. 

He sees John dead ahead of him, smoking a cigarette. His shirt is almost transparent from the water, and he’d somehow gotten his trenchcoat back. Gary runs for him, shouting. Gary smashes into a mirror. It shatters, and he feels a shard hit the side of his face, the same place Constantine had kissed him. Gary turns, and Constantine is at the other end of the hallway. Gary runs after him.

Constantine is fast, especially for a man who’d supposedly just almost drowned. He drops the cigarette. Gary pursues. He has a gun, but he can’t shoot while running. He follows Constantine out the door. The magician jumps over a gate. Gary follows. He loses sight of Constantine once he hits the ground. He can see wet footprints, though, so he starts to run again. 

He finds Constantine smoking another cigarette on a roof. The biggest mystery is how his cigarettes are still lightable after supposedly being underwater. Gary pulls himself up and aims his gun. 

“You’re under arrest.”

John turns around and breathes out smoke. 

“Mate, you get hit by the football players? Americans are savages.”

“I’ll shoot,” Gary says. 

“You don’t want to.”

“I’m an agent. I’ll shoot.”

Constantine takes a step closer. He keeps exhaling. The smoke is thick enough that Gary can’t see where to aim. 

“We’ll meet again,” Constantine says, and he takes a step off backwards. Somehow, the smoke had expanded enough to cover his departure. He must have used trick cigarettes or some kind of smoke fizzler. Gary looks down at his hands on the gun. He stares. His left ring finger has an expensive-looking gold and sapphire band that certainly was not there before. He reaches into his pocket, and the signed card from his first meeting with John is gone.

Ava is cradling her left arm, but she still chastises Gary. “You had a clean shot.”

“I couldn’t shoot a foreign citizen we’ve never actually proved did anything wrong, especially not one from somewhere else. That’d be a PR nightmare. I figured it wouldn’t work anyway. He’d vanish into a, well, a puff of smoke.”

“This is a colossal fuck-up,” Ava says. 

Gary hides the hand with his new ring behind his back.   
“Look at this,” Ava says. Her arm is almost recovered from Constantine setting the hypnotized audience on her. “I found something on a magical organization called the Eye of Horus. They sound like a cult, honestly, but they have this testing process for potential members. They’re supposedly this group of elite magicians that do good deeds or whatever.”

“And you think Constantine is with them?”

“I think he’s trying to do their tests.”

“Could be.”

“He’s made an announcement about his next performance. It’s in almost a month. We need to get him before then.”

“How?”

“I found an a location. I think he’s staying there. Haven’t tried to look into it yet, but I think it’s owned by a Horus agent. It’s just a hunch, though. And we’ve thought before about the idea of him not working alone. If Horus is involved with it, they might be giving him instructions.”

She makes eye contact with Gary. “Want to go after him?”

Gary nods. They will not have as much backup as would be prudent, but Gary’s ready. 

“Open up!” Ava yells, not bothering to tell the inhabitant who she is. If Constantine’s in there, he already knows. If he’s not, then the next few minutes are going to be intensely awkward. Ava breaks the door down and heads up the stairs. Gary turns to cover the main floor. 

He runs past the bathroom. He has to backtrack after seeing something in the mirror. He throws the shower curtain back, but the room is empty. The last room on the floor is a bedroom, and Gary shoves the door open. 

Constantine has pretty clearly been there, and recently. Rose petals are arranged on the bed. Gary stares, realizing the pattern. They’re the eight of hearts card. 

“Constantine!” Gary calls. He opens the closet door, and sure enough, what seem like several identical trenchcoats are hanging. Gary turns again. Something is different. The window is open. He looks down and sees the man running. 

“John Constantine!” Gary yells again. He hopes that Ava will hear him. He jumps out the window too and starts Ava’s van. Constantine is driving like a madman in a black SUV. Gary sees Ava emerge from the building. She gestures at Gary to drive. He floors it too. 

Constantine is breaking all sorts of speed limits. Gary tears after him, getting honks from other cars. He ends up following behind Constantine, going the wrong way on a bridge. He’s focused on driving, at least until he sees Constantine’s vehicle flip. Something inside it starts to burn. Gary throws the door open and jumps out, running to the SUV. He crawls down, pulling his jacket over his mouth so he doesn’t inhale smoke. He reaches inside, groping for anything.

“Green!” Ava yells, stepping out from the other vehicle. “Get out of there!” 

Gary scrabbles, his hand finally closing around something that feels like paper. He yanks it back just before the car explodes. 

Ava stands beside him, watching it burn. She doesn’t know what to say. Losing a suspect is always complicated. Constantine might have been guilty of something, but they would never find out. 

Ava looks at the papers. 

“They’re plans. For a safe. Constantine must have been after it too.”

“He must have,” Gary agrees. He looks back into the vehicle, and then up. Something falls from the sky, following the unpredictable path of a flying card. Gary grabs it from the air. His eight of hearts again, a little singed on one side. 

 

Since losing Constantine, Gary and Ava have been filing all the paperwork involved with a suspect dying. The man being British only complicates it. Gary is bored out of his mind.

“You know, Constantine’s last show was supposed to be tonight,” he remarks to Ava. “It would have been at the park, at midnight.”

“You want to look into it, be my guest. But I think John Constantine ran out of tricks.”

Following up the lead on the safe had been something. It was already gone by the time Gary and Ava figured out where it was supposed to be. It belonged to another local multimillionaire, and they hadn’t been able to find it. Constantine must have stashed it somewhere. It pissed Ava off to no end. 

“Yeah,” Gary says. “Best case, it’s a clue. If he was working for Horus, maybe something will happen and we’ll have to be there. It’s worth a shot.”

Ava and Gary are sitting in the car, waiting for something to happen. Constantine’s show would have started five minutes ago. Ava is ready to go home.

The rain starts to slow. Gary steps out of the vehicle. A few others are gathered, watching just in case. 

The rain stops, then starts to move upward. 

“What the hell?” Ava asks, standing beside him. 

“Up there!” Gary yells.

Constantine is sitting on one of the roofs. The audience cheers.

Gary runs, getting as close as he can. Constantine winks at him. 

“Welcome back to the show!” Constantine yells, voice somehow popping through speakers. Gary thinks it’s ridiculous to welcome them. He was the one who was supposedly gone, not the audience. 

“How the hell are you alive?” Ava is muttering. She’s sending a message for reinforcements. More audience members are walking up too. Ava curses. Undoing paperwork takes paperwork. 

Constantine pivots. He undoes his tie and wraps it around his wrists. He slips it easily, which is far from his most impressive trick. He holds it up for the audience, then flips his hands in a movement too quick to see. It turns into a cardinal and flies up. Gary dodges its waste as it flies over. Ava is not so lucky, a white stain hitting the back of her black suit jacket. She curses. 

Constantine lights a cigarette. Ava pulls her gun and shoots before Gary pushes her arm, forcing her to stop. The smoke clears. Constantine is perched in the same place, cigarette still in his mouth. He transfers it to one hand and spits the bullet into the other. He throws the bullet into the air and spins again. He opens his jacket, and more cardinals fly away. They circle around Constantine. He runs to the edge of the building and jumps. 

The birds dissolve into rubies. Constantine’s cigarette smoke is still hanging as his empty trenchcoat hits the ground. Ava swears and gets her boss on the phone. 

“Yes, he’s alive. No, I don’t know how. We couldn’t get him. I don’t know where he is. He just showed up and did another jewel trick. I don’t even know what the purpose of this was. Just to spit on us, maybe? It…” 

Ava pulls the phone away from her ear. “Green, we just got a lead on the safe. Could you stay around here and look for him while I run it down?”

Gary nods. “He’s probably out of here, but I’ll look.”

John sprints the rest of the way to the carousel. He knows his instructions. 

“Hello?” he calls. This is the point when he’s supposed to meet a representative for Horus. He’d call out a name, but he doesn’t know the identity of the person who has been giving him instructions that would somehow show up in a trick magic box. His commands for the first show had been in Latin in a small book that appeared, but every order after had been delivered on a standard playing card. He’d collected 52 cards. The last one had told him to find the carousel. The last two cards would be one joker and eight of hearts. 

John reaches, waiting for the next card to appear. He shines a light on the front of a joker, and a small drawing appears. It shows what looks like a picnic table. John stares at it, then looks ahead. A similar park table is directly in front of him. He runs for it. 

He stares at it. It seems like a trick table. He runs his nails along one of the boards until he feels the fake part. He lifts it, and the last card is under it, preserved by an ancient layer of glass. The card is facing down. John breaks through the glass with his fist and flips the card over.

John stares into the eight of hearts, and he traces Gary Green’s signature with his finger. “It’s you,” he says. 

“It’s me,” Gary agrees, stepping out from the ticket box. John had known for a fact that it was empty moments before.

“You’re with Horus?”

“I am.”

“So that time all those hypnotized football players jumped on you - and when you ran into that mirror-”

“All planned to make me look like a fool.”

John is staring. Gary leads him to the carousel. An aging machine that probably used to collect tickets is next to it. 

“Tickets, please,” Gary says. John starts to feed the cards to the machine. Each one sends a burst of smoke. The machine looks ready to collapse. John flicks the eight of hearts last, and the carousel lights up. Gary steps on, immediately climbing a unicorn. John stands next to him. 

“Welcome to Horus,” Gary says. “I know you have questions. I’ll tell you. There’s one thing I don’t know.”

John nods. He’s holding on to Gary’s forearm. 

“I know hitting on me wasn’t part of your orders, because I wrote them. Why’d you do it?”

“If the mission went to shambles, I could seduce you so you’d let me out of prison and we could run away, shag six times a day, and live our lives as sheep farmers.”

“Oh.”

“Fancied you too,” John adds. 

One second, Gary is swinging off the unicorn. The next, he’s standing right in John’s face. He tilts his head and moves his eyebrow, and John kisses him. 

Somewhere, Ava is yelling into her phone and trying to wipe her suit clean as she looks into the safe full of balloon animals. Behind John and Gary, the carousel interior is opening up into a stairway. John looks into it, and Gary pulls him by the arm.

**Author's Note:**

> About my narrative choices: I decided to make the Eye of Horus less powerful and conspiracy theory-ish than in the movie. I also cut out anything having to do with banks, because that… could have gone bad fast. 
> 
> I do think this would have been fun to do with a full cast of characters, but I couldn’t fit them all. I also adjusted the narrative to only have one magician. I switched around the roles of the Bureau. If I’d followed closer to the film, the character whom I replaced with Gary would have been the comic relief as well, where the Magicians consistently humiliate him. I decided that Legends humiliates Gary enough and it’d be Ava’s turn to get tackled and shit on by a bird. The film also has a sequel, and I would be more than willing to write a sequel to this fic as well if anyone would read it. 
> 
> Also… 4x15 was unbelievably good. Terms of Service, along with the Virgin Gary, was my favorite episode this season.


End file.
